Why don’t we apply modern manufacturing practices (able to trace any entity’s history, location, and usage) to realize Levy’s envisaged scenario of a decentralizing Knowledge Management (KM) Revolution (giving more power and autonomy to individuals and self-organized groups by employing distributed Personal KM Capacities backed by meme/cloud-based knowledge repositories as substitutes for our out-dated document-centric citation/reputation systems)?

Marc Pavillion

Since knowledge and skills are portable and mobile, professionals ought to be able to keep, maintain, advance, and share (if desired) their personal knowledge on their own personal devices independent of changes in one’s social, educational, professional, or technological environment. Disappointingly, current technologies only offer locating vast amounts of digital information, but adequate tools for selecting, structuring, personalizing, and making sense of the digital resources available to us are lacking. Accordingly, the opportunity divides for connecting and empowering knowledge workers are mounting. A novel concept-and-prototype-in-progress supporting Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is set to ease this problem. The PKM System (PKMS) aims to support creativity and human capital formation throughout individuals’ academic and professional careers, anywhere, and to strengthen their roles as contributors and beneficiaries of organizational and societal performance. The very need for a PKMS-like solution was already expressed over seven decades ago; although Vannevar Bush’s vision of the ‘Memex’ has remained unfulfilled, it represents the as-close-as-it-gets ancestor of the concept proposed.